Category Archives: art

A new book by anarchist writer Paul Cudenec has been published by Winter Oak Press.

The Fakir of Florence: A Novel in Three Layers explores, in fictional form, the connections between anarchism, metaphysics and artistic expression.

The three threads of narration centre on characters inhabiting different, yet interwoven, levels of reality.

Perantulo is a wandering sage, spreading his mystic pagan wisdom from Khaluvia to Mesqa-Murro, from the chestnut forests of Sevennola to the rain-lashed archipelago of Prydina.

He is the fictional creation of il fachiro, an Eastern philosopher who arrived in Renaissance Florence in 1459 and challenged Cosimo di Medici and Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonist revival with his own empowering and anarchic metaphysics.

Paul is a writer visiting 21st century Italy who, while laying himself open to inspiration from the energies and art of the Florentine past, comes across an historical account of il fachiro and his fables. But he, too, resides inside a book.

The novel is a first-time fictional publication for Cudenec, whose 2013 work The Anarchist Revelation: Being What We’re Meant to Be is described by John Zerzan in Why Hope? The Stand Against Civilization as “the least pessimistic book I can recall reading… It brings anarchist resistance and the spirit together in a very wide-ranging and powerful contribution”.

A review by anarchist writer Gabriel Kuhn adds: “The book attempts no less than equipping contemporary anarchism with a footing that is often neglected: the transformation not only of society’s structures but also of people’s souls”.

“Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him”.

“Capitalism hates authenticity, hates mystery and thus is utterly incapable of even beginning to appreciate the mystery behind the authenticity of artistic expression or of ever being able to understand why the products of its own system are so sterile and ugly”.

“Everything made by man’s hands has a form, which either must be beautiful or ugly; beautiful if it is in accord with Nature, and helps her; ugly if it is discordant with Nature, and thwarts her; it cannot be indifferent”.

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The Acorn: winter oak

Anarchism is a philosophy which, over the years, has often been seriously misunderstood, thanks largely to the efforts of its enemies. But the situation seems worse than ever today, in that even those who call themselves anarchists sometimes lack a clear understanding of what it involves. Sometimes they accept the comic-book version of anarchism presented […]

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